


schwarzschild radius

by Trell (orphan_account)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Canon, Mythology - Freeform, Other, Purgatory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-12
Updated: 2014-05-12
Packaged: 2018-01-24 13:18:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1606559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Trell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Purgatory is not a forest. Dean is captured and, by a stroke of luck, finds Castiel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	schwarzschild radius

The last Dean Winchester sees of Earth is Dick Roman’s sick smile, black running down his nose and mouth, lips stretched wide around too many perfect white teeth.

The last thing Sam Winchester sees of Dean for a very long time is Dean’s eyes flicking to him and then to Cas, starting to jolt away as Roman thrums with an energy that feels magnetizing and gravitic, even from where Sam stands with Kevin.

The last thing Castiel sees as an angel on the earthly plane is Dean, because Castiel has never been good at looking away.

* * *

Purgatory is not a forest.

Dean thinks it is, for a while, when Cas disappears after barely saying anything at all. (At least he hadn’t seemed crazy, not like before.) Dean runs and he fights and he kills monsters, and all he sees are trees and darkness—or sometimes an unnatural light pouring from the heavens, irregular, sourcing from no sun.

Looking at the sky here is uncomfortable, like there’s something missing between it and the ground. It’s as though it’s child’s picture, one where the horizon doesn’t exist: there’s just the blue (so to speak) at the top of the page and the ground drawn flat below, a blank nothing left in between.

It’s one of the many things he’d question Cas about, if Cas were here, rather than god knows where, snatched by god knows what. He’s sure Cas wouldn’t have left him: he’s sure he must have been taken away by something else.

But purgatory isn’t a forest, and it isn’t small, and Dean doesn’t know how long he runs and hunts and doesn’t sleep (he finds he doesn’t need to, and the strange light and constant prowling horrors keep from being able to, anyway) when he comes to its edge.

He falls over the edge, in fact. He runs out of the treeline, pursued by something massive with too many legs and too many claws and more tongues than he can count, and he sees the plains stretching ever on in the distance below, littered with a river, more forests, mountains, a _city_ ; and his foot catches on a tree root and sends him tumbling down, rolling through the damp black leaves and grunting with pain at every protrusion he hits.

It hurts, but his tumultuous descent down the mountainside has the bonus of getting him far, far away from the thing chasing him, so when he reaches the bottom he just lies still for a while and keeps his swearing to a minimum.

When things don’t hurt so much anymore, Dean gets back up, and goes searching for the next nasty thing he’s going to hurt until it tells him where to find his angel.

* * *

The irony of ironies is he ends up finding Cas by accident, rather than by torturing the monsters that prowl around him: all of them sniffle about the seraph, the seraph, remember him being dragged through by something big and terrible, but none seem to know where he went or by whom he was taken.

Dean kills them all, and wonders idly where a monster goes when it’s killed in monster heaven. He supposes he’d have to ask Eve.

He wonders if she was sent back down here, too.

Regardless, he finds Cas a month after coming down from the mountain, when Dean is wandering through an overgrown jungle, dense and humid and strange for the lack of insects or the sounds he associates with so much vegetation. It’s like someone looked at a jungle and made a poor replica, setting down the trees and greenery but draining their vibrancy, leaving it devoid of life.

He’s been hacking his way through the underbrush with his makeshift blade for days when he comes to a ziggurat rising out of an open space amidst the trees.

It’s an ancient thing, ornate and cracked and worn by time, and Dean’s instantly on alert for any sign of movement.

A light rain begins to come down as he circles the edge of the clearing, eyes on the snake statues that arc around its corners. He’s found that places standing out from purgatory’s usual scene are usually the dwellings of bigger monsters, things that don’t just dwell in forests but maybe are the sort of thing one summons, draws out with incantations.

He’s yet to have seen a structure so big, though (the cities in the distance notwithstanding), nor anything so—devotional. It’s an Aztec temple, Dean thinks, right out of the history books Sammy liked to get lost in as a kid: a distant relative of Teotihuacan, built in another plane by no one Dean can think of.

He considers moving on, avoiding it entirely, but eventually he decides that if anyone’s gonna know where Cas went, it’ll be a big, nasty fucker, like whatever is bound to live here.

So he stakes it out, for a while; waits for a cycle of darkness, if this part of purgatory is willing to give him one.

And it turns out Lady Luck is willing to throw him a bone, after all, because a few hours spent lurking in the underbrush reward him with purgatory’s starless night blanketing the jungle, making the ziggurat an indistinct shape in the clearing.

Dean waits, and waits, and he’s starting to wonder if maybe it’s empty after all when he sees a darker spot moving at the yawning gate near the top: something shifting over the steps, obscured from sight in the moonless shadows.

The thing—he still can’t make out what it is—seems to change direction, and he’s sure he hears _slithering_ as it moves up towards the ziggurat's highest point, following the square pathway around its angles. _Why’d it have to be snakes?_ Dean thinks, inanely, and has an absurd, addled vision of himself as Indiana Jones.

And then the shape has reached the top, and Dean’s thoughts stutter to a stop, because even in the low ambient light, he can see a new outline emerge.

Giant wings, unfolding.

Okay. Not snakes, snakes with wings. _Shit._ Dean tries to remember his pre-Columbian mythology: Bobby had made him read up on it, once, insisting it would come in useful, but that was a long time ago, years, around the time Sam went to Stanford.

 _Quetzalcoatl,_ his lagging memory finally supplies, and Dean presses a hand to his face, because of course he’s managed to find one of the central deities of the Aztec pantheon in purgatory.

Which is just about big and bad enough to fit something that would pick off an angel like a fly, actually, which just makes Dean grind his palm against his nose harder. He wishes he could swear, except he’s pretty sure that would alert the god (it’s a fucking god, like, a God-god, not some little forgotten subcategory deity, fuck him), towering above the clearing.

Atop of the ziggurat, Quetzalcoatl roars, and the sound reverberates mournfully through the forest, through Dean, so viscerally that he’s sure every other smaller monster in the area goes scuttling for cover.

If this were Earth, there’d probably be spooked birds and wildlife, too, all fleeing on instinct from the larger predator. Dean wants to—he _should._

Alas, humanity has the burden of being the only thing in the animal kingdom to not trust its instincts on big scary things with too many teeth; and Dean's pretty sure he has the glorious burden of being an idiot, which is why he crawls out of the underbrush, rises to a crouch, and runs for the side of the ziggurat that lies farthest from the serpent’s head.

He almost thinks he makes it, except even as he reaches the ziggurat and presses himself along the ornate carvings that rise out of the side, indistinct in the dark, Quetzalcoatl shrieks again, furious and wild.

What follows in the next thirty seconds is a blur in his head: the serpent comes striking down the ziggurat just like a smaller snake, and Dean sees the flash of long pale fangs and hears the sound of feathers; and then he’s being flung in the air like a ragdoll, the breath punched out of him, knife barely remaining clutched between his fingers.

He doesn’t even have time to contemplate what hitting the ground is going to be like when he feels something cold and long pierce through his jacket and he catches, dangling dozens of feet above the ground, gasping in shock.

When the world stops spinning, gravity sucking terrifyingly at his torso, he’s lifted to meet a golden eye nearly his own size, the pupil slit and surrounded with a slashed mosaic.

In his head, Quetzalcoatl says, _Human._

Dean, because as far as he’s concerned he’s stupid enough to rush the temple of an old god but not stupid enough not to talk back, pants out, “Uh. Hey.”

 _There have been no supplicants for a thousand years,_ the serpent says, _no vital blood,_ and Dean can see its gargantuan form swaying beneath him, making him swing nauseatingly back and forth. He’s caught on a claw, he realizes, hanging from a limb he hadn’t seen, and even in the dark he can see the bright colors of the serpent’s scales and feathers, hidden now but clearly vibrant. _There has been nothing._

This close, Dean has no trouble imagining the Aztec empire at its peak, this monster towering over them in its full glory, swallowing souls and the echoes of devotional pain, deriving its power from the blood shed in its name.

“Yeah, well,” he attempts, finding his voice, “this isn’t really a human kind of place, right? Just monsters and—things. Gods, too, I guess,” he amends, because the last thing he wants is to piss Quetzalcoatl off.

The eye flickers with a transparent lid, shut, open, the slit dilating at him. _Pray,_ booms through his mind. _Pray to me, believer: pray, bleed for me._

Dean’s mouth goes dry, because of course he doesn’t fucking know any Aztec prayers—he doesn’t even know any Christian ones, exorcisms aside. “How?” he risks, and tries to exude the sense of a devotee, and not a guy that was thinking minutes earlier about how he’d ice a draconic bird.

His gamble doesn’t fly. He hears _PRAY,_ and Quetzalcoatl’s roar this time is so close and so _bitter_ that Dean thinks his eardrums must be bleeding. _Pay me tribute, bring me souls, pray to me, supplicant, pray to me praytomepraytomePRAYTOME._

The mantra goes faster and faster in Dean’s head, until it pushes out everything else, leaves only the words ringing through his skull. He wants to scream. He does, he thinks, though he can’t hear his own voice: just Quetzalcoatl, chanting, making his muscles twinge with the urge to obey though he doesn’t know how. He doesn’t even have the space to think _make it stop._

Unconsciousness is a relief when it claims him, his mind shorting out under the pressure.

* * *

Dean wakes up pressed against cold stone, head aching. He can see a faint blue light beyond his eyelids before he can think about what it is: for a long time he just lies there, still, trying to find some train of thought other than the word _pray._

From what sounds like very far away, a voice says, “Dean,” in worried tones, and someone shakes his shoulder. It feels like it’s happening to someone else.

After a while, he starts to hear things other than the chant in his head, and struggles one eye open.

Cas sits beside him, glowing faintly in the darkness (they must be inside the ziggurat, because Dean sees no other light), blue spilling out from his coat sleeves and his collar and seeping faintly through his shirt. It’s still too-bright for Dean’s adjusting eyes. “Ow,” he groans, and closes them again; hears Castiel murmur, “I’m sorry.”

After he’s taken a moment to adjust—and to sing Metallica furiously in his head, the familiar words blocking out the roaring of the old god—he opens his eyes again, slower now, more careful. “Cas,” he says, “why are you glowing?”

“Quetzalcoatl has—ruptured my vessel,” Cas explains, slowly, like he’s choosing English words that don’t quite capture the meaning. “He wanted to see my Grace, so he cut through the shell until he could see it, but bound it so it would not escape.”

“That hurt?” Dean asks.

“Not unbearably,” Cas mitigates.

Dean lies there for a moment longer, and then it hits him, all of it, shit, he’d thought maybe he’d never see Cas again, he’d thought maybe he was dead or worse—he surges up from where he lies, his head spiking with the movement, and throws his arms around the angel, squeezing tight.

Cas freezes, and Dean just holds him harder, babbles, “You stupid son of a bitch, I thought you’d died, what _happened,_ why are you here,” and tries not to feel like he’s sixteen again, arms around Sam after a hunt got away from them, scared shitless and shaky with relief.

“I think,” Castiel says above him—he doesn’t move against Dean, doesn’t lift his hands from here they lie against the floor, and Dean feels momentarily sad that Cas hasn’t ever even been hugged, maybe, doesn’t even know what to _do,_ “Quetzalcoatl wanted a light, just like he wanted you for a supplicant. He has grown lonely.”

“Lonely?” Dean says, and finally pulls off Cas. Cas radiates heat like a tiny star, like a campfire—an effect of him being an angel, of the grace spilling out of his chest, Dean doesn’t know. “You’re tellin’ me an old god that ate people for fun got lonely. Monsters don’t do that.”

“Even monsters can be alone too long, Dean,” Castiel says, very quietly, and Dean kind of wants to punch himself, then, because he realizes the connection Cas is making: Dean’s said he considers angels monsters, too, and now he’s as good as implied that Cas hasn’t got feelings.

Dean thinks _other_ angels are dicks, of course. Cas—

—Cas is something else, and Dean is so glad to see him that it makes him ache. He hasn’t had Cas sane and by his side for so long it seems like forever: they’ve been ten kinds of fucked up, they’ve been enemies and caretakers, but here they are, Cas like he should be (almost, anyway) and Dean right there beside him.

Leviathan and demons and the devil rooming with Cas in his head, it seems, are not enough to part them. Dean’s never been more relieved about anything in his life.

Just as abruptly, it makes him want to press a kiss to Cas’s mouth.

He just barely stops himself, but the desire stays with him, settling hot under his skin now that he’s thought it. “God, Cas,” he rasps, and, “I know, man. I wasn’t saying—I’m sorry.”

Cas blinks at him, gaze sad, and says, “Dean. Between the two of us, I have far more apologies to make.”

“Whatever,” Dean says, not flippantly, just because he doesn’t want to argue the point. “I’m just so fucking glad to see you, man.”

Cas’s expression softens, the lines in his face smoothing in the low illumination of his own glow. “And I you.”

They sit there looking at each other for upwards of half a minute, Dean’s sure. He doesn’t care. No one’s here to accuse him of staring, and Cas certainly does it too much in return to mind; and maybe Dean wants to capture this moment where it seems like they’re so close to being okay again, in case everything goes to shit.

Cas leans back against the wall and draws his knees up to his chest. The light shining steadily out of his collar and cuffs flickers, and he winces; and Dean remembers anew what Cas had said about having his vessel _ruptured._ “What did you mean when you said Quetzalcoatl bound your grace? Are you gonna be able to leave here?”

Cas’s eyes slide closed as he tips his head back against the wall. Dean’s never seen him look so tired, and Cas always has the air of someone who hasn’t gotten to so much as sit down for a week. “I believe so,” Cas finally says. “Though there may be other difficulties.”

“Like,” Dean prompts.

“Like the fact that my true visage is currently trying to escape out this vessel’s cracks and emerge as manifest in this plane,” Castiel says, deadpan, like this isn’t one of the most outlandish things he’s ever said. “A process that would be very dangerous for us both, and extremely unpleasant for me.”

“Are you gonna burn my eyes out?” Dean says, startled. “Because, dude, give me some warning if you’re about to go busting out of your meatsuit like Alien.”

One of Cas’s eyes opens to give him a look that somehow manages to convey his irked confusion without his saying so much as a word. Of course he doesn’t understand the reference: and it’s so endearing, so _Cas_ , that Dean can’t suppress the inopportune smile that rises out of him.

God, he’s missed having his angel.

Cas, meanwhile, says, “Unlikely. However, it would make both of us even more visible to every other soul here, and as such is highly undesirable.”

“Gotcha,” Dean muses. “Okay. So, can we, like, cram you back in? All the way, so you’re not leakin’ out?”

He swears Cas’s lips twitch in an almost-smile, this time, and his eyes curve with a hint of amusement when he half-opens them to look over at Dean as Dean drags across the floor to sit beside him. “It may be something best fixed by time, provided I am not attacked again,” he says. “Nevertheless, the first consideration is, of course, getting out of Quetzalcoatl’s prison.”

“Right,” Dean says, and looks around at the dark. Cas’s glow isn’t enough to show him any nearby entryways: they’re piled in a corner, sort of, and he can see protruding symbols and carvings on the walls but not the rest of the room. “Do you know where we are?”

“The ziggurat has a very deep inner portion,” Cas informs him. “Quetzalcoatl keeps me here when he is hunting, and brings me up to his resting place so that he may look at me when he is present.”

“To look at you?” Dean files away the _away to hunt_ part for later, though he suspects ‘later’ is actually more like ‘soon’, when the old god comes back and probably tries to eat him for not knowing Aztec prayers. He adds, “And, dude, you gotta teach me some prayers the Aztec used, if you got any.”

“Quetzalcoatl was a god of fertility and sunlight as well as warfare,” Cas explains, eyes shutting again. “One of their creator gods. There is no sun here, no one to gaze upon his glory—so he keeps me here because an angel’s grace shines like a figment of a star, and I remind him of the Earth.” One of Cas’s shoulders rises in a sort of shrug. “And yes, I know their words.”

“Okay,” Dean says. “Does that mean he won’t kill you, if it comes right down to it?”

“I don’t know,” Castiel says. “I would avoid basing our strategy on that assumption.”

Dean blows out a sigh. “Yeah, me too,” he says. The cold is seeping in through the newly-made holes in the back of his jacket, and he shifts uncomfortably against the wall. “But you said he goes out hunting, right? He’s not here now. What’s keeping us from just running out?”

“Wards. Not all of the symbols there—” Cas gestures slightly around them, “are simply devotional. They are made so that any other unearthly being encroaching on Quetzalcoatl’s ground is ensnared.” A pause. “You, however, may be able to walk free, and, indeed, break the wards to allow me to follow.”

Dean frowns. “Is this as simple a demon’s trap, or holy fire? Break a line or two and it doesn’t work anymore?”

“In essence,” Castiel says. “There should be symbols on all four sides of the ziggurat, and a final one at its center. The four lie directly outside the perimeter within which I can move, alas, and the central one is in his chambers.”

“So you can get at that one,” Dean says, “right? And I can go for the others. Take a rock to ‘em.” His blade is gone, he realizes, irritated at being left empty-handed.

“Yes,” Cas agrees. “With you here escape is not impossible. Come here,” he adds, and reaches out, his fingers closing around Dean’s right wrist; Dean’s eyes are drawn irrevocably to his hand, broad and rough against Dean’s skin but long enough to be elegant. The kind of hands a doctor might have, or maybe a builder: someone who has to use them often and carefully, to create and heal rather than maim.

 _Not_ Cas’s hands, he reminds himself: Cas doesn’t have any hands that Dean can see. The real Cas is the light Dean sees spilling out around Cas’s thin wrist, around his neck, through the buttons of his shirt.

While Dean’s brain is busy dribbling out his ears, Cas takes Dean’s hand and places it palm-up against his own knee. “This is what the symbol you are looking for will look like,” he says.

And he traces it on Dean’s palm, which makes Dean kind of blank out for a minute before Cas says, “ _Dean,_ ” reproachfully, like he can tell Dean’s totally tuned out. Dean shakes himself and wills himself to pay attention to the pattern, and Cas explains aloud as he does it again, “a bar on top, with a curve like this—” at which Dean doesn’t shiver, he _doesn’t,_ “and two like this.”

Cas does it one more time before Dean says, swallowing, “Okay, I got it.” Cas just nods and releases his hand, like this isn’t the first time he’s ever touched Dean anywhere save for the _shoulder,_ like Dean’s legs didn’t just turn to jelly at the tender contact.

“Don’t go now,” Cas tells him. “He has been gone too long—soon he will return, and take us up until his next hunt.”

“Yeah, okay,” Dean says, _not_ breathlessly, goddamn. “About those Aztec prayers.”

They sit in the dark, then, and Cas teaches him words in ancient Nahuatl, spoken the way it was centuries ago: coaching Dean through stumbling over the syllables until he can recite the prayers the way the Aztec did, resolute and awed, uplifted.

The words echo in the dark around them, eerie and apropos.

* * *

Dean manages to find time to doze off, after they’re sure that Dean’s got both the prayers and the symbol he’ll need to scrape away firmly in his mind. Which is strange enough in itself: Dean hasn’t slept a wink since he arrived here, but next to Cas—with someone watching his back, with an actual source of warmth beside him—drifting off is easy, eyelids drooping until he’s startling awake hours later to Cas’s hand pressed against his shoulder.

“Ngh,” he says, articulately, and shuts up when Cas makes a cut-off sort of noise.

He hears the slithering, then, that sound of a massive serpent moving somewhere nearby, and resists the instinctive urge to grab for his knife. He hasn’t got it on him, anyway.

“Stay very still,” Cas breathes, and Dean listens, because one encounter with the old god was enough.

The slithering continues—louder, closer, he thinks, but he can’t place quite where Quetzalcoatl is, probably because he’s so huge he might as well be everywhere.

And then the serpent’s massive, feathered head looms up out of the darkness, hovering just above them like a poised cobra, and Dean completely forgets how to breathe.

 _Supplicant,_ the god booms. And thoughtfully, with something that Dean could almost, almost class as affection, if it weren’t underpinned with the threat of the monster before him, _little bird._

“Hello,” Cas says to the god, and Dean tries not to choke at the absurdity of such a conversation.

Claws come on limbs stretching out of the darkness, and the both of them are plucked up, pulled into the air; and Dean is carried, though he can’t see much save for Cas also held aloft not far away.

The god holds Cas so _carefully,_ Dean thinks dazedly: like he’s a fragile treasure and not a force of nature crammed into a human body.

They’re carried through the temple quickly, through passageways Dean doesn’t see and can’t memorize the turns of without having his feet on the ground or his hand to the wall. After a while he sees a light that doesn’t emanate from Castiel in the distance, and they emerge into a marginally less dark world outside. Quetzalcoatl is taking them to the chamber at the ziggurat’s top.

Dean doesn’t know what he expected—a mound of jewels like Smaug had in Tolkien's books, maybe, or a room no different from the rest of the temple—but the chamber they’re brought into is huge and lit now with torches. There’s an altar, a huge pedestal that Quetzalcoatl must recline on beyond it, and a place where Dean supposes worshipers would kneel.

He’s dropped on the latter, and watches, tense, as the serpent sets Cas down atop the altar, (gently: like Cas might shatter) and and moves to lie upon its pedestal. Dean notices that the walls are dark with blood.

 _Little bird,_ Quetzalcoatl says again, slowly. Castiel looks steadily up at him. The serpent tilts his head—looks closely.

Basks in Cas’s light, Dean realizes. Cas is his angel battery, Quetzalcoatl’s little sun.

Then Quetzalcoatl turns on Dean, and tells him, as before, to pray.

The words come tumbling out of Dean’s mouth: he doesn’t stumble or fuck it up, to his own amazement, but then, ever since he realized he needed to memorize exorcisms to avoid getting fucked over when he hasn’t got the text, he’s gotten good at reciting things he doesn’t understand.

The god fucking preens and roars with pleasure. Dean sees Cas wince where he’s sitting still atop the altar at the sound; ends up ducking, himself, when Quetzalcoatl spreads his massive wings inside, despite the fact that they can’t possibly fit at full span.

Cas glances at Dean, catches his eye, and—while the god is in the throes of devotional pleasure, apparently—motions, with barely a move of his fingers, towards a symbol inset in jade above Quetzalcoatl’s pedestal.

They’ve decided Cas will take it out after Dean’s broken the other four, but now that Dean’s seen the effects of his prayers on Quetzalcoatl, he actually believes this might work.

He finishes the prayer, and starts it again: and keeps going, wondering how long it’ll be before the old god allows them to leave long enough to break the other seals.

* * *

It takes several hours before Quetzalcoatl tires of the prayers and grows hungry enough to hunt, and by then Dean’s throat is dry and painful from speaking non-stop, his voice almost too rough to use.

When they’re back in the ziggurat’s depths, Castiel presses his palm to just above the juncture of Dean’s collarbones and Dean feels himself able to swallow and speak properly again.

“The symbols,” Castiel says. “Are you ready?”

“Yeah,” Dean says, and follows Cas through the dark passageways, wondering how Cas knows where to go. Maybe angels have perfect directional sense in purgatory, too.

He’s busy memorizing the turns this time when Cas stops abruptly ahead of him, tilts his head, and says, “Here. This is the limit of my movement without Quetzalcoatl’s leave.”

“Okay,” Dean says. “Do you know how much further?”

Cas rattles off a string of directions. Left, right, right, left—Dean repeats them back to him a couple times before setting off, hands out in front of him and feet moving very, very slowly along the ground now that he’s had to leave his light source behind.

It takes him some time, and a lot of groping along symbols on the outside of the ziggurat, but eventually he finds the right one and scrapes it off; and then he’s going to walk around the ziggurat to find the next one, he is, but he keeps getting lost every time he walks in one direction or the other; and that doesn’t make any sense at all, because it’s a straight wall and he should be able to find the damn corner, but eventually he heads back inside and manages to find Cas.

“I felt that,” is the first thing Cas says to him when Dean finds him. “The wards have weakened.”

“Awesome,” Dean says, and then they repeat the process again, and again, and again, until finally only the symbol in Quetzalcoatl’s chambers remains.

Meanwhile, Cas looks—winded, Dean notices. Like the brisk walk they’ve been taking is really taking it out of him. As they walk rather more slowly back to their usual place of imprisonment, Dean asks, quietly, “Hey, you sure this ruptured-vessel thing isn’t gonna go south real soon?” and, with more irritation, entirely out of older-brother instinct, “here, for fuck’s sake, lean on me.”

To his surprise, Castiel actually does. “Not yet,” he says, after a little longer of their hobbling. “I am concerned that it may be soon, but—not yet. We have enough time.”

“All right,” Dean says, dubiously. “If it happens before you think, what exactly am I supposed to do?”

Cas looks sideways at him. His glow has spread—Dean can see it through the skin, now, like subsurface scattering but all over, and his eyes are less white than they’re _white,_ unearthly and too bright. “There’s nothing you could do,” Cas informs him.

Dean can’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “Great. Awesome.”

Cas actually scowls at him, a little, but doesn’t say anything else.

When they reach their chamber, Cas lies down by the wall, curled in on himself in a way that sets off alarms in Dean’s head—no one lies quite like that unless they’re suffering internal injuries, unless there’s something really wrong—and Dean sits next to him, carefully not touching. They wait.

* * *

Their plan works, after a fashion.

Quetzalcoatl is crooning with pleasure at Dean’s prayers when Cas smashes the jade symbol with his bare hands, and then:

The serpent shrieks, and Dean turns to run for the door while Quetzalcoatl lunges for Cas, because they’d expected this part. Cas says he’ll be able to move short distances, at least, even if he can’t just zap them out of here in his current state: so he’ll vanish just as Quetzalcoatl reaches him and follow Dean out, giving them extra seconds.

The thing is, Dean’s earlier prediction comes unfortunately true, and Quetzalcoatl doesn’t go for his angel battery.

He goes for the human that showed up and started causing trouble, instead.

Quetzalcoatl lunges after him, fangs bared, emitting a hiss like a thousand angered snakes at once. Dean just manages to jump sideways and tuck into a roll, and the serpent’s head skids over the stone where he’d just been: Quetzalcoatl shrieks louder, enraged, and twists to follow.

Dean bolts behind the altar, even though it’s barely any cover. Quetzalcoatl is finding it hard to maneuver inside his chamber with his wings half-extended, and it takes him time to turn: Dean manages to get behind it before the serpent can twist all the way around.

He sees Cas jump—such a strange thing to see Cas do, given how restrained his usual range of motion is—and grab hold of the feathers of Quetzalcoatl’s left wing.

The serpent slams its wings against the chamber’s ceiling, the chamber’s walls, flaring them out on reflex, and attempts to twist around to snap at Cas. Pieces of stone crumble from the ceiling. Dean takes this as his cue, and full-on sprints for the doorway that leads out onto the stairs leading up the ziggurat.

There’s a shriek behind him that makes the walls shake, and then Dean’s out the door, past the molding damp of the inside and with cold night air hitting his face. Immediately he skids, turns right, runs along the ziggurat’s top tier rather than attempting to go down the stairs.

Cas appears beside him as he runs, materializing out of thin air and hitting the ground running, and Dean can feel the ziggurat shake under them with the force of Quetzalcoatl’s rage inside the chamber.

There’s a thud, and Quetzalcoatl’s smashing out through the doorway they’ve just left behind, not taking care to fold his wings away, simply bearing through by simple force. As Dean had hoped, he attempts to slither down the stairwell for a moment—enough to buy them precious seconds—before realizing his prey’s gone in a different direction.

Cas, Dean manages to notice, is glowing like a fucking beacon, _pulsing,_ like there’s a detonation starting deep inside him and the flashes of it are all that’s making it to the surface.

They turn a corner. Behind them, he can hear Quetzalcoatl turning, recoiling, moving along the side of the ziggurat to follow them, wings beating, claws sinking into the stone to propel himself forward. Dean can see cracks starting to form along the platform they’re running along, ancient masonry coming apart in the face of the old god’s violent movements.

Cas says, “Dean, hold on,” grabs him by the arm, and pulls them both over the edge of the ziggurat’s tier.

For one long, horrifying moment, it’s like they’re suspended in the air, caught in the inevitable pull downward. But Dean’s startled scream doesn’t even make it out of his lungs: he hears one solid, loud wingbeat, and they’re on the ground at the edge of the clearing.

Cas drags him into the trees, hand vice-like around Dean’s wrist, dragging him with all that superhuman strength he has and the light under his skin reminding Dean of a cartoon nuclear reactor on the verge of a meltdown.

He thinks they make it several miles through the undergrowth, Cas jumping them forward again and again (it’s incredibly disorienting—Dean’s running and then his feet are on a different stretch of ground, in a different place) Quetzalcoatl's cries growing more and more distant behind them.

And then they’re in another clearing, one Dean doesn’t recognize, and Cas tears away from him, staggering, gasping. Dean nearly falls over backward without Cas’s pull to counterbalance, then follows him on unsteady feet, blood pumping, heart beating so fast in his chest he wonders if he’s about to have a heart attack.

Cas, a few meters ahead of him, stumbles, makes a choked sort of “Unh,” sound, and then Dean hears the distinct crack of bone and sees something expand in Cas’s side, under his arm.

There’s a prolonged instant where Dean just freezes and stares, watching Cas’s fucking ribcage shatter as something moves inside him, and then there’s an awful sound—tearing and _organic_ —and something long and bent and bloody bursts violently out of Cas’s side, light spilling with it.

“Cas!” He doesn’t know whether to run forward or back: Cas shudders as the _appendage_ flexes outward, drops against the ground.

Cas’s other side bulges, and his back, and his neck, and he’s glowing so brightly now Dean has to squint, and Dean can hear all of Cas’s bones fracturing from the _outside—_

And then Cas says, his voice very strained and about an octave higher than it usually is, “Dean, move back, _move back right now, run,_ ” and Dean obeys, because he’s not stupid enough not to.

He’s made it halfway across the clearing when Jimmy Novak’s body fucking detonates behind him, and he’s swallowed up by light just like he really has been caught in a nuclear explosion.

Dean’s expecting to be burned to a crisp, maybe, to at least be thrown into the treeline, but he isn’t: something cushions the blast around him, and he just ends up hitting the ground with his hands covering the back of his head and his neck, everything else blasting past him in one great deafening, decompressive wave.

He doesn’t move right away when the ground around him finally seems to settle, dirt raining back down from where it’s been flung high into the air. He is having, he finds, a hard time processing what just happened. His brain tries to, and kind of stutters to a halt around the _Cas exploded_ part _._

Dean pushes himself up on an elbow and cranes around to look, shaking with the shock. Something wet and inescapably _singed-flesh_ lands on his face, and he prides himself on not actually taking a moment to puke.

Behind him—

The thing behind him towers over the treetops, fills the clearing. It’s painfully bright, and it keeps changing and multiplying in his vision, layer upon layer upon layer of different things: a towering beast with too many eyes, a giant eagle, a half a dozen golden rings spinning around a fiery nucleus.

The more he looks the more versions there seem to be, and he slams his eyes shut because it fucking hurts to watch. He’s actually pretty sure he’s about to die, anyway, because whatever tore Cas up from the inside is going to kill him, and.

He knows that he doesn’t actually hear what he hears next, not with his ears, anyway, because those are still ringing like he just stood next to an exploding grenade.

In his head, a very small, concerned, and very much familiar voice offers a tentative, _Dean?_

* * *

“Jesus fucking H Christ on a motherfucking tricycle,” Dean is saying, with as much vehemence as he can possibly muster. He’s shaking so hard with his adrenaline crash that he can’t actually get up off the ground, right now, but if he could his knees would probably be buckling under him.

Above him—or, well, in his head—Cas mutters a contrite, _I am very sorry, Dean,_ for the third time, and Dean follows his litany up with, “Oh my _god,_ ” which, while less expletive than the previous versions, probably sums the experience up most accurately.

When he finally shuts his mouth long enough for Cas to get in something other than a brief apology, Castiel says, _I should be able to rebuild my vessel and re-enter it in a few days. This is highly unfortunate, but not insurmountable._

“Highly unfortunate,” Dean giggles. “Holy shit. _Holy_ shit, Cas, you’re like, a million feet tall and I’m not going blind looking at you but I can’t exactly see you anyway, and you’re, you’re, holy _fuck._ ”

Cas’s voice (melodic and as layered as his image—a harmony in a thousand different tones) takes on a curious note. _What are you seeing?_

“I,” Dean says, “have my eyes closed, for the sake of my fucking sanity. What I was seeing was, like, eyes? And an eagle? Some floating rings, and some kind of, um, rock-thing with a core. And a whole bunch of other stuff, all piled on top of each other.”

Cas hums with interest. It’s a pretty sound, like bells, and it makes Dean’s hysteric post-adrenaline high spike with infectious cheer. “Oh, my god,” he says again, and wonders if it’s possible for him to just dissolve into the dirt he’s currently lying on, arms and legs splayed. “How are you doing that? What are you doing? Why didn’t I go blind when I saw you?”

 _I’m not doing anything,_ Castiel says, but he apparently knows what Dean means, because he adds, _Perhaps your body is simply responding to the presence of an uncontained angelic entity with chemical signals._ And, as an afterthought: _I don’t know. Perhaps purgatory serves as a buffer_.

“You so weren’t kidding, were you,” Dean babbles. “About the wavelength of celestial intent thing. Or about not being a dude. Holy shit, I think one of the things I saw had, like, ten breasts and sixteen arms. Are you _sure_ you’re an angel and not, I dunno, Durga or something?” With barely a pause for breath: “Have you been lying to me? _Am I buddies with a Hindu god?”_

 _Dean,_ Castiel says thoughtfully, _I really think you need to calm down._

Dean takes a breath and tries to stop shaking, and very, very carefully, opens one eye to look up at Cas before promptly shutting it again, because Cas’s body, manifestation, whatever, is still flickering wildly. “Dude,” he attempts, at a somewhat lower pitch and his words a little less jumbled as they come out, “I told you to warn me if you were going Alien, damn it, I thought you were getting taken over by something, fuck.”

 _I told you while we were still in the ziggurat,_ Cas points out, reasonably. Dean, his maturity worn down more than usual by the fact that he just outran a fucking eighty-foot winged snake and then watched his best friend’s physical being get splattered all over the scenery by the exit of his actual manifestation, sticks his tongue out at him.

Cas probably can’t even see it from a billion fucking feet up. Though at least six of the forms Dean saw had about a hundred eyes scattered all over, so maybe he does.

Whether or not he sees it, Cas just carries on, _We must consider where to go to wait out the rebuilding of my vessel. Perhaps somewhere physically harder for other souls here to reach._

“Uh,” Dean says. “Cas. I’m pretty sure this one’s up to you, considering.” Dean’s liking his spot on the ground plenty, right about now. Preferably he’d like to remain here for the foreseeable future, like maybe until he gets feeling back in his legs.

 _Don’t move,_ Cas says, very much unnecessarily, and Dean feels himself lifted by—by—by static, or something, god, it’s kind of like lying on an electric field but without actually being electrocuted. He hears the flap of wings, the only thing about Cas right now that’s actually familiar, and then Cas is saying, _I believe I’ve found a suitable place._

“Okay, awesome.” Dean feels Cas set him down on what feels like leaves, feels the almost-electric warmth settle in around him, humming like distant instrumental strings being struck to some improvised symphony. Dean’s going to sleep for a year. “I’m just gonna, uh, lie here for a while, all right?”

 _I have no intention of moving, either,_ Cas informs him, and the distant strings grow calmer as fatigue eases Dean’s mind into sleep.

* * *

“So,” Dean says, later. He is watching Jimmy Novak regrow his liver.

Or rather, he’s watching a perfect replica of Jimmy Novak being remade from a scrap of his flesh, which Cas had apparently managed to keep. The body is ill-formed as yet, a featureless thing floating in a pale haze that’s part of Cas’s grace.

“So,” he repeats, “you’re saying, the further we go, the more impossible this place’ll be to get out of.”

 _Yes_ , Cas says. He sounds quiet in Dean’s head, like maybe he’s doing the angelic equivalent of dozing, trying to recuperate his strength. He hadn’t been wrong when he’d said assuming his true form would draw more monsters to them: this moment of peace is a brief one, one that they’ve achieved by Cas reserving all the energy he’s not putting towards regrowing his vessel for teleportation.

 _It is not unlike the human idea of a Schwarzschild radius._ Cas’s voice is barely a murmur in Dean’s consciousness. _In your earthly plane, there are spots where the force of gravity is so much that a hole is punched through spacetime, a place where the circumference around an object will remain the same while the radius grows infinitely large._

“Purgatory’s like a black hole,” Dean parses.

_Yes._

They stay in silence, for a while—they’re on a hilltop somewhere in the jungle. For the moment, they’re far enough from monsters, Cas curled around Dean in a way that shields him but doesn’t make Dean stare straight at him, less concentrated parts of him flowing out towards where Jimmy’s body hangs. Dean sits on the ground, arms out behind him.

After a while, he says, “Cas, I,” but then Cas says _Dean_ at the exact same time, and they both stop. “You go on,” Dean overrules.

 _I wanted to apologize,_ Cas says. _You did not let me, earlier, and I understand the words may be meaningless to you, but—_

“But you gotta say what you gotta say,” Dean finishes, suddenly bone-weary. He doesn’t want to think about all the things that Cas has done, or that he has himself, or why he should hate this creature around him rather than fear for it more than he does for himself. He shouldn't have his few dreams, nightmares and pleasures both, centered around it—he shouldn’t have _anything_ with Cas, shouldn’t feel anything.

But he does, oh, he does, and he’s long past being able to deny it, now.

He’d slept again last night (if purgatory’s periods of greater darkness can be termed that) by some fluke. His dreams weren’t nightmares, but he wishes he could forget them all the same: because now he’s got the image in his mind of Cas in his bed, stretched out below him, loved.

Dean shivers at the thought, hard, and thinks it’s weird that his dreams still show him Cas as Jimmy’s body, when Dean’s spent days surrounded by what Cas _really_ is. It’s only too clear, watching Jimmy’s body reformed from just a cluster of cells, that for the Cas Dean knows it’s only a vessel, a jar.

He wonders, blankly, if it’s wrong to picture Cas as something that he isn’t, if means Dean’s just deluding himself. He decides, forcibly, that he doesn’t care, because it’s not Dean’s place to do so.

Cas draws him out of his sudden reverie by saying, _What I did, Dean. I tried to give you reasons. They were not meant to be excuses._

Dean’s fantasies evaporate, leaving only harsh physical memory. “Yeah,” he says. “I know. But when you fuck up that big, Cas, usually it doesn’t matter why, just that you did.”

 _I am sorry,_ Cas says, and his voice goes almost inaudible at that. _Dean, I am so sorry. I would do anything—_ he cuts off, then.

Dean doesn’t ask him to finish: just scrubs a hand over his face and wishes, vehemently, that he himself were a better man. Wishes that the next words out of his mouth didn’t have to be, “I can’t forgive you, Cas. Not yet. Not all the way.”

A lot of people died, he should say. A _lot_ of people, almost nowhere in the world left untouched by the quiet leviathan menace. But that’s not what Dean’s thinking, not really, because all he can think is _you betrayed us you hurt Sam you hurt my little brother,_ and he has a hard time getting past that.

He’d be able to live with just the first part, he’s sure. It’s the second half that he can’t let go, no matter how much he wishes.

Castiel is silent, and the hum that emanates from him is almost gone, the muted distant sounds of harmony discordant and minor-key.

Dean croaks, “Sorry,” because he hates himself a little for the fact that he can’t forgive; for the fact that no amount of relief or love or lust can get him to let go of Cas’s past transgressions.

 _No,_ Cas says. _No, you shouldn’t be._

Jimmy’s body changes suddenly, the growth continuing where Dean hadn’t even noticed that it halted. Castiel hums on around him, subdued, and doesn’t say anything else.

* * *

Castiel compresses, _collapses,_ and settles back into a human form utterly minuscule in comparison to himself.

It’s definitely still an unearthly creature that looks out of Jimmy’s eyes when Dean finally looks at him again, though; definitely Cas, too, and, well. “Good to have you back, dude,” Dean mutters, and Cas gives him a strange look like he doesn’t understand Dean at all.

Probably fair, considering that Dean manages to want to kiss him one minute and wants to punch him the next.

“We should go,” Cas says. “Before another condemned monster’s soul finds us.”

“Yeah,” Dean says. “Yeah.”

They set out down the hill, a little ways apart, Cas’s trenchcoat pulled lightly behind him by a breeze that Dean can’t feel: descending into Purgatory in earnest, towards its ever-expanding center, caught in the pull.

**Author's Note:**

> Written around October 2013.


End file.
